Some appointment scheduling systems address the need for two or more people to choose a mutually-agreeable time for an ad hoc meeting or phone call. Such systems typically enable a meeting organizer to offer specific timeslots or to share general calendar availability from which the other parties can choose a time. Other appointment scheduling systems address the need for a service provider to offer timeslots to service consumers on an ongoing basis, or during special promotional campaigns, as governed by availability rules defined by the service provider. Both categories of known systems suffer from an array of inconveniences that create a burden for the meeting organizer or service provider, as described below.
Existing systems do not provide a convenient visual mechanism by which a meeting organizer or service provider (collectively “the user”) can choose timeslots that will be offered or define availability rules that determine what timeslots will be offered in a scheduling transaction.
Existing systems do not interoperate with the user's primary calendaring system (such as Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar) in order to give the user context for choosing timeslots or defining availability rules, and for automatically inserting booked appointments into the user's primary calendar. This forces the user to manually inspect his/her primary calendar when choosing timeslots or defining availability rules, and forces the user to manually reconcile appointments between his/her primary calendar and the appointment scheduling system when appointments are scheduled.
Existing systems do not provide a mechanism by which availability rules and free/busy information from the user's primary calendar are cross-referenced at the moment a scheduling transaction is initiated as a means to ensure that timeslots offered by the system do not conflict with existing commitments in the user's primary calendar.
Existing systems fail to employ a simple “building-block” approach for configuring the system. This makes it difficult for users to establish an initial configuration to begin taking appointments, and difficult to reconfigure and expand the system in response to changes in user requirements.
Existing systems fail to provide a robust mechanism for users to actively invite customers and colleagues to schedule an appointment for a specific activity or promotional campaign, or to schedule an appointment for an activity chosen from a group of activities defined by the user. Further, existing systems that rely on email invitations to promote appointment scheduling do not provide the ability to embed a customizable action button within the body of an email message as a means to compel action from invitees, and do not provide a mechanism to track the response to email invitations.